By turns tragic and darkly comic, the stories are a mixed bag in terms of style. They are unified, however, by theme. In "Islands," for example, a boy and his family visit their Uncle Julius on the island of Mljet, which is infested by the very mongooses that were imported to deal with the snake problem. Julius, veteran of a Stalinist prison camp, takes a stoical tack: "So that's how it is, he said, it's all one pest after another, like revolutions." And when the family returns to Sarajevo, they are greeted by their neglected, starved cat, shaking "with irreversible hatred." The hungry feline returns in another story, when we learn that Sarajevo under siege was filled with starving cats, which were eaten by starving dogs. If it's symbolism you're after, look no further.
One of the best stories, "The Sorge Spy Ring," wonderfully evokes a sad childhood spent in the shadow of Tito's cold war repressions. A man buys his son a portable telegraph set, and the two communicate in Morse code in the privacy of their own home--but later the father is arrested for espionage, and as Tito finally dies, he too languishes on his deathbed, weakly sucking a banana. The image is both poignant and pathetic. It's also the sort of tight close-up that Hemon loves (the camera and the television are dominant images, as one might expect from a writer who resorts to CNN to find out what's happening at home). There are moments when his language is slightly unidiomatic and offkey, as if he's leaned too heavily on a well-thumbed thesaurus. On the whole, though, this is an honest, vivid, and sometimes brilliant collection. --Jonathan Allison
]]>
Stories keep mattering by reimagining their own methods, manners, and techniques. A writer has to believe, and prove, that there are, if not new stories, then new ways of telling old ones.
The collection includes 29 of these new ways of telling stories. Herein are experiments with form by David Foster Wallace and Joe Wenderoth, flawless executions of realism from Mark Richard and Jhumpa Lahiri, and stories that waver in what could most easily be described as parallel realities. The granddaddy of this latter category, George Saunders's "Sea Oak," brilliantly fuses the inherent humor of male stripping with the undead. Elsewhere Gary Lutz proves himself to be one of our foremost artists of the sentence in "People Shouldn't Have to Be the Ones to Tell You," and Christine Schutt serves up "You Drive," an elusive piece unsettling with undertones of father-daughter incest.
The varied treasures in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories accelerate outward into new modes of American writing as if from a radiant nucleus. While each story is daring in its own right, the most daring feat of all might have been including them all under the same cover. --Ryan Boudinot
]]>Ce recueil contient les nouvelles suivantes :
Îles
La Vie et l'Oeuvre d'Alphonse Kauders
Sorge et son réseau d'espions
L'Accordéon
Échange de propos plaisants
Une pièce de monnaie
Blind Joseph Pronek & Dead Souls
Mirage de la vie